The American self-driving company Waymo has launched a large number of self-driving taxis in Los Angeles and San Francisco. It claims to be able to rely on lidar, radar and cameras to build real-time 3D environment maps, drive autonomously on complex urban roads, and communicate with cloud servers. However, it frequently "rolls over" in terms of the most basic physical details:Small problems such as the door not being fully closed, the passenger seat belt being stuck, or the battery being depleted will cause the vehicle to be paralyzed on the roadside, and it can only rely on external manual "rescue". This has given rise to a new type of "self-driving taxi rescue gigs."
The report pointed out that because the car is completely enclosed and passengers and bystanders cannot make mechanical intervention, when the door sensor detects that the door lock is not fully engaged, the system will directly stop running; similarly, if the battery is exhausted before reaching the charging point, or if the seat belt is abnormally fastened, the vehicle will also stop moving and must wait for outside personnel to come and deal with it. To this end, Waymo uses a towing and roadside assistance platform called Honk to pay local partners at least US$20 per trip, allowing them to be responsible for "closing the car" and towing it back to the base. This type of on-demand manual intervention has become normal in the company's main operating cities.
Cesar Marenco, a tow truck operator who runs Milagro Towing in Inglewood, Los Angeles, said he has built a steady side business closing doors and towing Waymo vehicles, and receives as many as three call-out requests a week through Honk, either to deal with stubborn car doors or to tow a fleet of electric Jaguars that have run out of battery. He admitted that as long as there is no driver in the car, passengers will always make mistakes in details such as closing the door or fastening their seat belts, and no one in the autonomous vehicle can remind them on the spot. "There will always be human errors." He even filmed a TikTok video of towing away a Waymo vehicle and saying "Bye, Waymo" through Meta smart glasses, which has been viewed more than 400,000 times.
Waymo spokesperson Katherine Barna admitted that such manual intervention does occur, but emphasized that door failures are "uncommon." She said that the company is constantly improving the pick-up and release process, including strengthening the use education for passengers and reducing the occurrence of door ajar or unlocked. However, once there are problems with urban infrastructure, these "small problems" will quickly become magnified. The report mentioned that a large-scale power outage occurred in San Francisco earlier this month, causing many traffic lights to malfunction. Dozens of Waymo self-driving taxis were "petrified" at intersections and stopped in the road. The towing company received a large number of emergency requests from the Waymo dispatch center. Many videos of self-driving Jaguars being blocked in the driveway or being hoisted onto the tow platform also appeared on social media.
In response to this outage, Waymo spokesperson Ethan Teicher explained that when the vehicle encounters an extinguished traffic light, it will treat the intersection as a "four-way stop" intersection, and it will take longer to confirm that the intersection is safe, so it will stay longer than usual. However, he also admitted that the remote fleet response center received a high concentration of "help" requests that day, resulting in a processing backlog. Some vehicles occupied the intersection for a long time, affecting traffic flow. San Francisco Supervisor Bilal Mahmood called the situation "dangerous and unacceptable" and called for a public hearing on Waymo's local operations.
Practitioners also revealed that rescuing these unmanned taxis is not easy. Evangelica Cuevas, owner of JJK Towing in Los Angeles, said some streets are narrow and it can be difficult for a tow truck to get close to a broken down vehicle, and they can spend 10 minutes to an hour combing the neighborhood to locate the vehicle. Simple "closer attendance" pays around $22 to $24, and towing duties can bring you $60 to $80, but that's not always a good deal when you factor in gas and labor costs. In San Francisco, Alpha Towing manager Jesus Ajuiñiga even said that he refused to accept a Waymo job on the day of the outage because the price quoted was lower than the $250 he usually charges to tow a four-wheel drive vehicle, and Waymo vehicles are full of sensors, which increases the risk of damage and compensation. "This is unfair."
From an industrial economic perspective, academic circles have also proposed new ideas for cost reduction. Keith Chen, a behavioral economist at the University of California, Los Angeles and former head of Uber research, suggested that companies like Waymo can collaborate with online ride-hailing platforms to outsource some simple offline operations to nearby gig drivers, such as letting Uber or Lyft drivers work part-time to help close the door, or directly giving discounts to passengers to encourage them to actively complete these additional actions during use. Currently, in some markets, Waymo has been connected to the Uber application, and users can hail Waymo's self-driving taxis through Uber. This platform integration is regarded as an infrastructure prototype for a future hybrid network of human drivers and unmanned vehicles.
In order to reduce reliance on manual "rescue", Waymo has also made adjustments to the vehicle hardware design. The report mentioned that Waymo is testing a new generation of models produced by China's Jikrypton. These models are equipped with side sliding doors that can automatically open and close. One of the original intentions of the design is to eliminate the root cause of the "door not closing" failure type. If these automatic sliding doors work reliably, Waymo's self-driving taxis may no longer need to pay $20 for a human to press the door lock, at least for the "closing door" step.